Hodgepodge Wednesday: Queues, Quests, and Quintessential Beauty

1. Do you send Christmas cards? If so about how many will you send this year? How do you display the cards you receive? Or don't you? (gasp!)

• Yes, most years I do send Christmas cards--about 25-30, and receive about that many. I tape them to the back of the front door, as pictured halfway down this post.

I used to include our family Christmas Chronicle which journaled our year in (lame) poetry. It's been several years since I wrote one, for lack of inspiration, but I might revive it this year.

2. When do kids become adults?

Great question! Hmmm, I'm tempted to ask, "Can I get back to you on that?" so that I might possibly come up with an erudite answer. The thing that keeps coming to mind is that adulthood
seems to be not much as an age reached, but a perspective understood. That perspective seems to include a combination of fiscal responsibility, personal priorities, a sense of gratitude rather than entitlement, and a display of selflessness that includes serving his family, showing up for work when he doesn't feel like it, keeping a commitment even when something more appealing presents itself, and it includes having a quest for purpose and vision about his life.

As for the fiscal responsibility part of maturing, a child nearing adulthood seems to be "arriving" when he realizes that he has to put his own hard-earned money into the ATM before it will spit any out. When he puts more in than he takes out, he matures further. When he pays his bills on time before thinking of any luxuries, he is marked as more mature than when all the bills were paid for him. And when he shares his earnings regularly for the sake of another, rather than thinking only of himself, I would say he has pert-near reached adulthood.

3. Does your 'beauty regimen' change with the seasons?

If you mean the seasons of the year, then no, not much except for the lip color. I wear moisturizer 365 days a year, mascara most every day, usually eye shadow, and some blush. If you mean the seasons of life, then yes, in the sense that I am more careful as I age about protecting my skin. I also drink more water than I used to because I really think it moisturizes skin which , in addition to having good genes, keeps the skin softer and more radiant, which translates to "younger looking."

Boy, I'm starting to sound like an infomercial. Moving right along...

4. What's something you like to eat that might cause another person to turn up their nose?

Brussels sprouts. I used to turn up my own nose at them until about two years ago on a date, when our waitress convinced me to try to them as part of the special. They were fresh, cut in half, drizzled with olive oil, and roasted till tender-crisp and sweet. I had never liked them before (I'd tried them twice) because they'd been boiled to death and tasted like buttered golf balls.

Not that I've ever eaten buttered golf balls. (I tried eating unbuttered golf balls once, but...oh, never mind.)

The secret to liking brussels sprouts is not fixing them the way your mother's generation cooked everything.

5. Gloves or mittens?

Gloves. Mittens are fairly useless since the only time I venture out into the cold is when I need my fingers to be flexible for driving vehicles, scraping ice , shoveling snow , or assisting a 13-year-old man-child up the hill after he has wrenched his knee while snowboarding on one inch of the powdery stuff because he wore out his 7-months pregnant mother by begging her ad nauseum to try his new board in the backyard. I won't mention names, but he is getting married soon.

6. What's the longest queue you've ever been in? Was it worth it? Queue=line but doesn't queue sound nicer?

Yes, "queue" is a nicer-sounding word, Joyce, and one of my favorites. Longest queue I've ever been in was for a women's bathroom stall at the Women of Faith Conference in Kansas City several years ago. It was about an hour after lunch. There were 10,000 (give or take 278) women who also needed relief, and there were probably only eight restrooms in what seemed like 14 city blocks' worth of convention hall.

Even though all the mens' facilities (except one) had been reserved for the women, they certainly hadn't been converted for us. You know what I'm talking about.

There really isn't much a woman can do with a urinal. Especially an hour after lunch.
Although, I wonder how many women were sorely tempted to experiment.

At least one woman was, but she didn't yield to the temptation ,and by the grace of God, she didn't mess her drawers either.

She didn't even care that the lock on the door didn't work when she FINALLY-thank-you-LORD, FINALLY got a vacant stall. (She's not sure the woman exiting had fully exited, either, or if she knocked her out of the way whilst the woman zipped up.)

Sitting on that toilet (maybe she didn't even make it to sitting position?) was worth every second of "holding it," considering the alternative. Absolutely. She became a woman of faith in the almighty bladder and in the overwhelming ability to distract one's mind away from her bowels and onto solving complicated math problems such as 10278 divided by 14, x 7, - (14-7) to the 82nd power.

7. Besides Christmas, what is one thing you are looking forward to in the month of December?

I am eager to attend a parents' luncheon for the December 2011 graduates of the College of Education at my daughter's university. Our precious Sarah, who will graduate with a BS in Early Childhood Ed, has invited my husband and me to this special occasion.

We are so proud of her and what she has accomplished, and grateful that she puts her heart and soul into her studies and her student teaching. Forsooth (does anyone use that word anymore?) I absolutely love that she wants us to be at the luncheon. (That's another sign of adulthood--when your kids are no longer embarrassed to be seen with you, but actually ask you to be seen with them. It's almost worth the price of tuition.)

8. Insert your own random thought here.

Today I got to do one of my very favorite things in all the world- -have an international guest and a missionary in my home for a meal. My friend Bonnie is home on furlough from Zambia with her roommate/"adopted" daughter Swazi (who is 22). The three of us had lunch on a cold rainy day, and I got to hear first-hand what their lives are like, and felt honored that Bonnie prioritized her very busy schedule to include four uninterrupted hours with me.

It's just really too bad that missionaries have to spend so much of their supposed R&R setting up meetings, raising support, and showing the same videos over and over instead of just resting and relaxing, or reading and rejuvenating. The R&R for missionaries actually appears to stand for "Running and Rallying." But what is the solution?

Bonnie requested egg salad, so I obliged and just had to bake peanut butter cookies with Dunkin Donuts coffee, a treat I've been promising to serve her the whole time she's been gone. PB cookies and DD coffee. Yum!

And hot tea for Swazi, who was having trouble warming up, literally.

Swazi's first impression of America is "it's cold!" Oddly enough, we've been having a warm spell here in Maryland this past week, but today was cold and wouldn't stop raining. Swazi didn't have an umbrella, but I had a brand new polka-dotted one, still with tags on, so I wished her an early Merry Christmas, and she promptly popped it open before heading up the driveway in the pouring mess, all smiles.